﻿Vote green ﻿andy brown

Bill Clinton famously put a sign up behind his desk saying "It's the economy - stupid!" It helped him focus on successfully growing the economy whilst getting the entire US national budget back into surplus. Before the Republicans came along and destroyed that surplus with their irresponsible ideas of cutting taxes & de-regulating markets.The next leader of the Green Party could gain quite a lot by copying the idea. She should put a welcome message on her screen saver saying: "It's the environment - stupid!"The Green party has a number of things going for it that have the potential to make it extraordinarily popular. They include:1. It is right about the direction of development of the economy. Technology is changing rapidly. We are moving away from a world that can only function by burning fossils. There are plenty of good moral reasons to want to do this. There are also rock solid economic self interest reasons. Across the globe from China to Saudi Arabia governments are making major efforts to switch their economies away from oil and gas as quickly as they possibly can. No one does well by being the owner of resources or possessing skills or running companies that have become out of date. Boiler making is a dead trade. The people who invested in Apple early prospered. A party which argues for the necessity of the UK being at the forefront of that change to a new technology will be very popular. The best policy the Green Party had at the last election was to invest 1% of the UK national budget on scientific research and development. People saw the sense in it and admired the ambition for a better future.2. It is right about the importance of local communities. The single most unpopular policy of the current Conservative government with the people who voted for it is its determination to allow developers to build whatever they like across green field sites. People don't want to wake up and discover lorries going past their window on the way back to the fracking well or to see land that they have loved for years covered in yet another executive housing development. These people can be mobilised very easily to defend their local environment and to fight this kind of thing off whilst still fully recognising the need to build more single bedroom starter homes at prices in the right places at prices that young people can afford. Increasing numbers of people are beginning to understand that getting rid of so much social housing has left a huge gap in the community which is going to be very hard to repair. It is now very easy to argue that a healthy community needs a mix of private housing and affordable social housing. It is also easy to persuade people that local government and housing associations need to be supported not bullied into selling off what they own on behalf of the public.3. It is right about transport. There is so much to be gained by investing in a properly co-ordinated and efficient public transport service. The Northern Powerhouse concept of connecting majority of the North of England into one large job market, skills pool and technology transfer centre is an excellent example of what could be achieved. It is a relatively cheap and efficient way to rebalance the UK economy so that work is more evenly distributed across the country and more people can live in environments where homes are affordable and they have easy access to spectacular countryside. The same model can easily be applied to the South West or to the Birmingham/Black Country conurbation. The current mess of eccentric companies running different parts of the railway service without any powerful co-ordinating force is hugely unpopular. So is the fact that the Northern Powerhouse is currently all talk and no money or action.4. It is right about collaboration. The Green Party has honestly told the electorate that we need strong local government, strong national government but also strong European and world institutions. Problems don't stop at borders in the modern world and so messy difficult international collaboration is a must and the idea that "A New Europe is Possible" is very credible and necessary.5. The Green Party has been seen to be right in opposing a series of very bad wars which have had dreadful consequences for people and wildlife in the countries invaded or bombed including the generation of large numbers of helpless refugees.Yet despite having got so many of the big things right the Green Party in the UK remains a small party that has yet to make the major breakthrough to being taken in deadly earnest as a potential government of the country.Some of the reasons for this are fully understandable. The Greens have been arguing against austerity politics and putting forward serious economic alternatives. That is not an easy thing to do at a time of major budget deficit. Common sense says that if you aren't balancing your books you need to cut your spending. Unfortunately common sense is wrong and economists have known since the 1930s Great Depression that some recessions are so deep that the only way you can get out of them is co-ordinated international action to boost all the major economies at the same time. That isn't an easy or simple message to get across. Particularly when you are also trying to explain that when we do expand the economy we will have to change it radically so that it is a low consumption form of growth that we are creating and doing massively more to ensure that getting the economy moving again doesn't mean burning more fossils, ripping out more raw materials, destroying more forests and dumping more plastic into the sea.But not all the reasons for the Green's failure to make a major breakthrough are down to difficulties in explaining an honest and necessary policy in the face of a hostile press. Many of those difficulties are down to policies or at the very least ways of communicating those policies which I think are wrong and which are deeply unpopular. For example:1. Nationalisation is not the solution to every problem. Sometimes it is helpful but the most effective economies - such as the Chinese since Deng - have always been a mixture of free enterprise and state planning. Green policies need to be business friendly as well as people friendly and environmentally friendly. I don't know anyone in the Green Party that wants to introduce a North Korean style state run economy. But I have heard people explain things so badly that this is what it sounds like they want to do. If that is the way we come across to other then we won't get to implement any of our excellent policies and the Greens will have to be content with trying to criticise the deeply damaging policies of those who do win votes and power.2. Freedom is every bit as important as equality. At its core the Green Party is a very libertarian organisation but it can often come across to the public as an organisation that wants to stop people doing lots of things. No one will ever win a high proportion of the votes in the UK by allowing itself to sound like the party of more restrictions. Greens have to articulate and develop their policies as ones which are enabling and empowering.3. Long term ambition is not the same as the policy the Green Party would implement tomorrow. I have a long term ambition to live in a world with no passports or borders where we are free to move wherever we wish. I also think the UK has hugely gained from immigration and we need a refreshing injection of energetic young people from other countries to sustain the increasingly elderly population of this country. Furthermore I am convinced that we are not doing remotely enough to help out with the refugee crisis. That doesn't mean I think we can function in today's world without any controls whatsoever on immigration. That is actually Green party policy and appeared in our last election manifesto so we shouldn't be embarrassed to remind people of that policy. Saying that kind of thing clearly and often is necessary, helpful and honest. It also means that people can't easily write you off as nice but a silly little idealist who can't be trusted to make realistic decisions. It increases our chances of looking after more refugees rather than reduces them.4. The aim of policy making is not to develop the most radical policy possible so that no one can outflank you from the left. Policy making is about making sure your proposals will work before you talk about them live on TV or radio. The Greens have been really poor at internally road testing their policies and getting rid of all the weaknesses before the leader is sent out to become easy meat for even the gentlest of media interviewers. Natalie didn't have a brain meltdown on live radio because she was personally flawed. She failed to explain a Green policy because it had been announced before it had been properly worked through and she was hung out to dry by being sent out to an interview before she had been subjected internally to every argument against it that could be predicted. If that happens to the next leader the Greens are finished as a serious force.All of this leads to my final and biggest concern. Too many Greens are very happy to write people off. I have lost count of the number of people who have told me that votes couldn't be won in particular localities because they are all Tories there or it is a UKIP stronghold. I won 30% of the vote in a seat that "always votes Conservative" in the last council elections and would have won if Labour hadn't stood and taken 25% of the vote. I won votes from Conservatives that Labour could never have won. The same thing happened in the national general election. I stood in one of the safest Conservative seats in the country, where I was told it would be impossible to retain the deposit. I got 5.7% of the vote and easily got the money back. Several of the people who voted for me said that they were intending to vote UKIP before I spoke to them on the street because they were desperate for an alternative. Once they heard Green policies they liked them. This is not down to some personal impact. In the last Council elections up and down the country the Greens did really well in Conservative held seats because people were prepared to vote for a sensible Green candidate that they knew personally who would never have voted Labour.The only way to win elections is to listen to what people say, argue strongly back against things you disagree with and explain in straightforward honest terms why we are going to have to adopt sensible environmental policies sooner or later and we might as well get on with doing it now before the cost goes up even further. The new leader of the Green Party needs to learn that lesson. Either we vote for someone with the limited ambition to lead a pressure group without much influence. Or we learn to speak to the core concerns of the people we are hoping to represent and make sure that they understand why electing an environmentalist with a fierce determination to do the right thing is the best way to protect their own vital interests. I think we should do the latter and lay the groundwork for a huge move forward.

​Month after month, year after year the UK's trade figures seem to get worse. We are currently running an annual deficit between what we buy from abroad and what we sell of £36,673m. This is not just a problem of a failure to sell enough goods, it is includes services. The entire economy is in serious deficit. The last time the UK ran a surplus was 1997.There are some economists who believe this is no great problem. After all only around half of the countries in the world can run a surplus on exports every year as by definition the surpluses and the deficits must average out to zero. But this UK deficit has gone on for nearly two decades.The reason is desperately simple to state. UK industry isn't making enough things that the rest of the world wants and our consumers find products from abroad to be a better buy. We have been paying for this in three different ways. The first is by selling more services than we buy. This ought to be no problem. It makes little difference whether people in other countries want to buy steel from you or to pay to download computer games or access a specialist insurance market. But, of course, if the service sector you rely on is itself vulnerable then the situation is very different. The UK has relied on a banking sector which has begun to develop a reputation for dodgy dealing and that doesn't represent the most secure way to plan the nation's future.This weakness is further compounded by the second means we've been using to pay for the lack of attractiveness of too much of what we have to offer. We have been taking fossils out of the ground in large quantities and using a limited capital resource to cover a deficit on income and expenditure. North Sea Oil was supposed to have been a bonanza for the country but pushed the pound up artificially and contributed to a lack of competitiveness. It gave the illusion that the country was doing well when in fact we were failing to adapt to the future quickly enough and slipping behind. Now it is running out and many politicians are trying to get us to repeat the mistake by going for fracking. At a time when even the Saudis are trying to get themselves free of over dependency on fossils this also does not look like a very good long term solution.The third way we've coped with the deficit is to draw money in from abroad. Every time there is a deficit on the country's current account it has to be paid for by a flow of money into the country. We have seen huge capital inflows into the UK over recent decades. A great deal of that money has gone into London to buy high end property. There have also been huge purchases of financial assets held in the UK - often from oil rich plutocrats or families and friends of corrupt dictators looking for a safe place to store the money they have extracted.This comes at a heavy price. It has had a corrupting influence on the London financial markets. It also puts the price of London property up to staggeringly high levels. Already ordinary working people can't afford to buy a home in London from their salary because so much of the property there has ended up in foreign hands and the prices are now way beyond incomes. Perhaps most worryingly, it creates an enormous source of potential instability. If anything happened to cause foreign investors to worry about the value of their investments then the consequences of a mass move to get their money out of the UK could be a lot more dangerous than the negative impacts of it arriving. Any panic move to sell off assets would produce an even nastier re-run of 2008.Britain therefore needs to get back to selling as much as it buys. If you listen to many EU out campaigners then the way to do this is simple. We get out of the EU and suddenly we'll magically start selling to the rest of the world. Why this would suddenly start to happen is usually not explained. After all there is nothing to stop us selling to the rest of the world right now and Germany certainly seems to be able to do it very well from within the EU. Those out campaigners who do attempt an explanation tell us that we will be able to get rid of all that pesky regulation and be more fleet of foot. Translated that means we'll be able to ditch workers rights, women's rights, paternity leave, environmental controls and health and safety legislation. We'll be cheaper because we'll be able to treat our employees worse and that will lower costs. Hardly a strategy for a successful high wage economy.The truth is that the entire in out debate is pretty irrelevant to the fundamental problem. Britain needs to be better at producing the goods and providing the services that are going to be needed across the world in the next few decades. The ways to do this are simple to state:1. Invest in future technology. We remain remarkably bad at taking new UK inventions like graphene and finding ways to exploit the full potential of those products. Manchester University didn't even take out a proper patent on graphene and the attempts to create new businesses based on it have been so poor that they have been the subject of a parliamentary committee enquiry. Meanwhile Germany is furiously investing in green technology companies whilst the UK government is pulling the plug on almost all green economic initiatives. The Paris climate change conference guarantees that moving to a low energy economy will be the main economic trend of the next decades. The UK needs to invest in being at the forefront of the green energy revolution.2. Invest in a skilled workforce. I leave you to decide whether UK University fees represent good value for money and encourage skill acquisition. I also leave you to speculate on whether the UK attitude to the acquisition of manual skills is healthy or gives the impression that apprenticeships are a route only taken by the thick kids. Not an attitude you'd find in Germany. The world used to consist of a few highly skilled nations and a great mass of uneducated people. That is no longer the case. The relevance & quality of UK further and higher education is a critical issue for the future.3. Support small businesses to grow and compete. UK banks are very good at finding a complex way to invest money obtained from a variety of hard to trace bank accounts. They are not good at supporting a company with a good idea with affordable finance. If the private sector continues to fail to do this then some of the remaining banks that had to be nationalised after the huge private sector failure of 2008 are going to need re-designing to do the job.These things are simple to state but have proved remarkably hard to do. Mainly because we are following an ideology which says that we can leave it to the free market to transform our economy. This refusal to use all the tools at our disposal is not an approach taken by China, Japan or Germany all of which have done really well by combining the efforts of both state and private enterprise. Developing a strategy for doing to create a secure and sustainable basis for the UK economy is vital if we are going to get the country positioned successfully to respond to the future. That is the issue that the country should be furiously debating instead of wasting time and energy talking about how we best collaborate with our European neighbours.The UK has a huge advantage of a highly educated workforce and some very imaginative small businesses. That competitive edge will only remain if we invest in the technology and skills of the future. That means getting serious about gearing up to take advantage of the Green Economy.

​I always learn something when I go out on the streets campaigning and talk to ordinary people. What I've learned from the EU referendum campaign hasn't been pretty. When you ask folk whether they have made their mind up about exit and get into a conversation it is remarkable how quickly and how often that conversation reveals deep prejudices.For example, this week a man of about 60 who seemed like a very pleasant average citizen told me that he used to live in London but he didn't dare go there anymore because it had been taken over by the Muslims. He wasn't referring to the mayoral elections. He genuinely believed no elderly white man was safe walking the streets. When I said that I went there often and I thought it had a fun mix of people and you could be whatever you wanted to be there he gave me one of those pitying looks that indicated that I couldn't possibly mean it.A few minutes later I got into a second conversation with a perfectly ordinary person who also wasn't remotely a member of the British Movement or an enthusiastic UKIP supporter. He told me that we had to vote exit so we could get rid of all the immigrants who were coming over and ruining the country. When I gently pointed out that a lot of immigrants were working very hard at unpopular jobs and paying tax that was currently being used to pay for the pensions we were both drawing and the NHS care we were both receiving it was clear that he hadn't met anyone who held that point of view for a very long time. I was informed that we already had quite enough of the buggers and it was time we did something about it so he was going to vote out.This is what is most interesting and significant about the EU debate. Most of the participants on both sides are trying to frame the debate on the basis of some kind of logical argument but that isn't what is going on with a significant minority of the public. To give Farage his due he tries very hard to stop his supporters from playing the race card and openly argues against racism. I think this is underestimated in importance when you compare his position with the openly and enthusiastically racist Nation Front party in France or the Austrian far right. We are fortunate that even the far right in the UK states its anti-racism fairly frequently.But what is being said by the exit camp and what significant numbers of the people I am speaking to are hearing aren't the same. A lot of people are going to vote out because they genuinely believe that when we leave Europe someone will kick out all the blacks and we'll go back to how things were in the 1950s. There is a visceral emotional certainty amongst many out supporters that one single step will put an end to all our problems and those problems pretty much begin and end with foreigners.If the vote to leave succeeds then it will feed and encouraging that emotion. There is a kind of naughty enthusiasm amongst a faction of the public that sees an out vote as THE opportunity to tell government that the country is being taken over by foreigners and it has to stop. A win for the out campaign would normalise and verify some quite ugly sentiments.There are, of course, plenty of out folk who are voting to leave on much more reasonable calculations. I disagree with them but the disagreement is a healthy one. They think we must leave because we will get rid of all red tape and bureaucracy. I think this means we will get rid of workers' rights, women's rights and environmental controls. Many out folk say we must leave so we can trade more with the rest of the world. I can't see what is stopping us from doing that now. Germany certainly manages to maintain a successful manufacturing industry and sell across the world. So far as I can see we simply create uncertainty about the future of our relationship with our biggest market where we sell 47% of our goods. Out campaigners say we will have lots of new money to spend because we won't send anything to Brussels. I think the harm of austerity is nothing to do with the EU and everything to do with irresponsible banks creating a massive boom and bust in a dangerously uncontrolled market. I also think we've done one sensible thing to fend off the bust which was to print £375 billion of money - way more than anything we've sent to Brussels. Then we've wasted that quantitative easing money by giving it to banks to create a property and stock market boom that does nothing to transform our economy. In short I think in or out of Europe is actually completely the wrong debate. What we should be discussing is how to transform our economy for a low energy future and how to improve our balance of payments by investing in future technology.More and more people seem to be starting to agree with me that on balance we need to stay in. They, like me, have huge numbers of criticisms of the EU. They see European political collaboration as hard, difficult and messy work. But they also see it as necessary. They want to see the EU reformed by the UK's influence rather than weakened by its absence. Many of them are worried that Turkey could be allowed full membership at a time when its President is busy destroying its democracy and its free press. Many of them are also worried that the Syrian situation is creating challenges that look really hard for the EU to resolve effectively. They see the problems as highly significant. But they are unconvinced that we can solve Europe wide problems by simply trying to separate ourselves from Europe and leaving those problems to our neighbours.The referendum is likely to be decided by how many of those who quietly want to stay in turn out and vote. The convinced out voters are very determined and will turn out regardless. The in folk are much less sure that this is the biggest issue around and don't always sound like they think it is really worth their time and effort to turn up and vote. They may not bother.I suspect the outcome will be very similar to the Scottish referendum. At the last minute droves of people will decide that all this exit talk really is too much of a gamble. When the Prime Minister, the Leader of the Opposition, the Scottish and Welsh Nationalists, the Lib Dems and the Greens agree on something the majority of voters will decide that it is just possible that they aren't all getting it wrong.What happens then is not so simple. Regardless of who wins there will be a legacy from the campaign. People won't ditch prejudices they have felt able to openly air just because the vote has been decided. The folk who have openly shared their conviction that we are being over-run by foreigners with their neighbours over the garden fence don't seem very ready to change their minds. Scotland shows us very clearly that you can win a vote at the polls by quite dramatic margins one year. But you can't remove the emotions that the campaign generated quickly or easily.The emotions generated by those who wanted Scottish independence don't seem to me to have soured Scottish politics in any way. Rather they have enhanced it and energised people to take an interest in the future of their country. The emotions generated during the out campaign across the UK may leave a much more damaging legacy.Cameron clearly thinks that he can let an EU debate run its course and then we'll all get back to normal business. If what I'm coming across is remotely typical then it is going to take a lot longer to repair the damage than he thinks.

Elections are a time for facing up to cold reality. Locally, nationally and internationally. My own personal local experience was a harsh one. Standing as a Green candidate in a Ward that has always been strongly Conservative I managed to push the Conservative hard with the following result. Conservative 511 votes (44.5%), Greens 346 votes (30.1%), Labour 291 votes (25.3%). In a first past the post system I lost. In a single transferable system it looks very much as if I would have narrowly won.I would like to think that I got close to winning an "unwinnable" seat for a small party because a lot of people no longer care about the political label but are prepared to vote for anyone they think is half way straight and honest. So my thanks go out to all those normally Conservative or Labour voters who were quite happy to vote for a Green candidate. Nevertheless a lot of people are, understandably, very bored by politics and still vote the way they normally do regardless of the quality of the candidates or the arguments any particular candidate puts to them. I was facing a particularly weak Conservative candidate but the label was enough for a lot of folks to vote for her regardless. And the Labour party split my vote and let her in!When it comes to national elections I have always believed that you have to take the results at face value and it is daft to blame the press and the BBC for reporting bias just because they don't share your own partisan analysis of the results. I no longer think it is that simple. In his first budget after the last election George Osborne cut the BBC's income by around £1bn and the Conservatives have made it very obvious that if they don't like the coverage they will go after it hard again. This does not make for brave objective reporting. When you put that together with journalist who struggle to understand that conventional wisdom about what voters will do no longer applies you get a seriously flawed analysis from the BBC. Too many reporters didn't seem to me to be willing to change what they intended to say just because of a pesky little thing like the actual facts.I don't support Labour. I am not impressed by the way a large number of its MPs have tried to ignore the popular membership vote for Corbyn. Nor was I particularly taken with the way so many of them loyally voted for bad wars, cheered Brown to the rafters when he told us he was putting an end to boom and bust just before the crash, or offered the voters the opportunity to put the party of austerity light into power in 2015. But I try not to let my disagreements with them interfere with a hard objective assessment of how they have actually done in an election.So I have continued to assert the factual mathematical truth that Labour didn't actually lose any share of the vote in 2015. What happened was the Lib Dems lost seats to the Conservatives and that's why we got the government we did. And I'd also quite like to assess 2016 local elections also on the basis of the numbers. As I write this they are as follows in terms of seats won in England:Labour won 1,280 seats - down 24Conservatives won 753 - down 35Lib Dems won 341 - up 39UKIP won 58 - up 26Greens won 32 - down 1The comparisons are with 2011 not with 2015. That was one year after the coalition came in and raised tuition fees and was quite a bad year for the Conservatives. So holding steady and winning over 500 more seats than the Conservatives was actually a decent result for Labour in England. Labour didn't cling on by their fingernails. They actually did rather well.In the case of London they did spectacularly well. It is normally a close contest and holding the seat had turned Boris Johnson into one of the most prominent Conservatives. They fought a very dirty campaign to try and hang on to it. They lost hands down. Labour got around 44% of the votes, the Greens a further 5.8% whilst Conservatives got the desperately low score of 35%. This wasn't down to any UKIP split. They only got around 3.6% of the vote in fifth place. It was down to Conservatives losing a lot of votes to Labour in the largest and arguably the most important contest of the night. In my book that counts as a pretty dramatic victory.Across the rest of England Labour also did very well and UKIP failed to break through. Even in Rotherham, after all that had happened with the child abuse scandal Labour won and there was no breakthrough for UKIP. Nowhere in the UK did Labour lose an important council and they easily won both parliamentary bi-elections. They are a long way from being a spent force yet and it is entirely possible that having someone like Corbyn who actually seems to honestly believe what he says is the reason that they didn't go into the kind of tailspin they did in Scotland. This would be in keeping with the reason that a lot of Scottish people who voted to stay in the UK vote for the SNP. They respect a party that seems to have a high proportion of honest people who say what they really think rather than what they think is more likely to help get them elected.Saying things that voters think you actually believe is no longer electoral suicide. It is now a necessary electoral asset. Even the Conservatives benefit from this. Their central message is that we need to take money out of your pocket to avoid economic problems in the future and in 2015 more people voted for austerity to be inflicted on them than any other option. They may have lied about a lot of other things but you can't accuse them of covering that one up.Even when almost everyone in the media tells the voters that a politician is so extreme that they are unelectable it is no longer true. Hence Corbyn winning the Labour leadership. This isn't just a UK trend. It is the single most important lesson from the primaries in the States. I don't like Donald Trump. I don't think he is honest and I think his policies are deeply divisive and dangerous. But you can't accuse him of pandering to the opinions of the popular press. He has won despite the media not because of some conspiracy by it. The same is true of Saunders. An openly Socialist politician is winning shed loads of votes in the United States. That isn't supposed to happen. But he inspires trust.I think the reason for this is that each form of the media tends to give you a different era of politics. The era of radio, when voters were first exposed to mass media and almost everyone in the nation heard the same broadcast, was ideally suited to propaganda. It produced some very unpleasant dictators such as Hitler and Stalin. The age of TV gradually produced politicians who were very good at looking good and producing short term sound bites that appealed to the centre ground. You got in if you found out what the opinion polls said and then repeated that back to the voters quickly. Hence the election of politicians like Blair who were at their most popular when they didn't really stand for anything except what they thought most folks wanted to hear. The age of social media is different. You have to inspire people. A good twitter storm can over-ride weeks of newspaper coverage and TV bulletins. Because a lot of people get their news and views from friends over the internet it doesn't matter so much if the media doesn't think you are electable. What matters is whether a large group of people will make Facebook comments about you that are positive.That creates some scary possibilities. It makes it easy for very nasty people to put forward horrible extremist views that were previously unacceptable and to win elections by appealing to the lowest common denominator. But it also creates a much more positive possibility. Plug away honestly at what you really believe and if what you say resonates with the public then you can bypass the opinion of the mainstream media and get those ideas accepted. That seems to me to be a fundamentally optimistic situation. We are in an era when no one can control which ideas you encounter and that gives a chance for different voices to be heard. If we want the world to change then we have a much better chance of achieving that than we ever had in an era where you needed several million pounds in order to own a TV station before you could have your say. On the morning after losing an election that under any fair electoral system I would have won I find that a re-assuring thought.